


for everything unsaid (there is a flourish of my pride)

by theprincessandtheking



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Clarke shaves bellamy's space beard, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Future Fic, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 11:33:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12556492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theprincessandtheking/pseuds/theprincessandtheking
Summary: “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess I just didn’t really care either way anymore.”She pauses, and from the corner of his eye he can see the odd expression on her face.“So in the middle of wartime, when everything is going to hell around us, shaving is still a priority. But you spend six years with all the free time in the world for it, and suddenly you don’t care?”He tries to smile at the joke, but he thinks it comes out as more of a grimace.“I guess down here it was more of a sense of normalcy,” he explains. “But with you gone—”He pauses, clears his throat in an attempt to keep his voice steady.“Without you there, nothing really felt normal.”For the prompt: pls write a drabble where clarke shaves bellamy’s beard s5 and its all like quiet at first but its intimate bc they havent talked in so long so there’s so much unsaid and they’re all up close and personal but THAT BEARD NEEDS TO GO hahaha thank you





	for everything unsaid (there is a flourish of my pride)

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a drabble, but 2500 words later, here we are. Special thanks to @sgtbellamy on tumblr for this awesome prompt!

The leaves crunch beneath his feet as he makes his way to the clearing, and again he’s reminded of just how close they are to winter. The chill in the air at first light gets sharper by the day, and Bellamy is struck by how much this feels like the anxiety he’d felt during the days at the dropship.

Clarke says that this time they’ll be ready, that she and Madi have been storing up enough food to get them through until spring. But he sees the way her expression tightens, sees the faint lines that appear between her brows as she inventories their stock. Despite everything the last six years has stolen between them, recognizing her unease isn’t one of them. He knows that no matter how much she’d hoped the rest of the group would be back on the ground by the time the first snow fell, adding seven more mouths to feed wasn’t part of the plan.

But that seems to be the only thing that _hasn’t_ changed between them. The years have hardened them both, inside and out. He sees her struggling, both to survive and cope with the world as it is now, but he doesn’t feel as though he has the right to comfort her the way he would have before he left her behind. He wants to— _fuck_ , he wants to—wants to wrap his arms around her and tell her that _he’s okay, she’s okay, they’re both alive._ But he doesn’t.

They argue more, like they had when they’d first been sent to Earth. But this time, there’s a bite in their tones that he knows is due to something much more painful than mutual disdain.  They haven’t talked about that last day, the day he’d left her to die. They don’t talk about much at all, to be honest, aside from food rations and strategies to negotiate with Eligius to get their people out of the bunker. It’s not the easy quiet that they’d found here the first time around, one that felt like a warm blanket draped over their shoulders. This was just…silence.

Before the world had ended again, Clarke had been a lot of things to him. His best friend, his partner, his sounding board. He’d even thought that maybe someday she could have been more than that, too—something that might make both of their lives about more than just surviving. But not even the second apocalypse could have made him think that she would ever be a _stranger_ to him.

Bellamy reaches the edge of the clearing where the earth goes flat, creating a meadow about thirty yards in diameter, and makes his way to the hollowed-out log at the edge of the trees. He slides his pack from his shoulders and drops it to the ground with a soft thud, taking a seat on the jagged bark. He rifles through the bag until his fingers find their targets, setting his supplies out beside him.

He places the battered mirror on his knees in front of them, angling it so that his face is visible. He tries to recognize the person he sees, the one who appears so much younger than he feels, aside from the tired eyes that stare back at him. The metal tin in his hand opens with a _pop_ , and he feels himself smile at its contents. Animal fat isn’t his first choice for shaving cream, but it’s far better than anything they’d had on the Ark.

He dips his fingers into the tin container and scoops some of the grease into his fingers, fighting against a grimace as he feels it soften on contact with the warmth of his skin. He presses it to his jaw, spreading its oil smoothly across the surface of his skin and into the hair of his beard.

The blade of the knife he’d found is dull and slightly rusted, and that combined with the lack of practice makes the process far more difficult than he expects it to be. The cracked mirror resting against his legs certainly doesn’t help, scattering his image in multiple directions and making it difficult to track his progress.

He startles at the sound of a branch cracking behind him, causing the knife to painfully nick the crest of his jaw. He swears at the sting it brings.

“Bellamy?” Clarke appears at the edge of the tree line pulling a rope behind her that’s weighed down by several rabbits. It’s been a productive hunting day. “What are you—oh.”

He sees the tips of her ears turn slightly pink as she sees the knife and the shattered mirror in his lap and begins to understand their context. Even in the days back at the dropship—god, that feels like a _lifetime_ ago—shaving had always been something of a private affair for him. It was a way to clear his head before he began the day, a way to add regularity to a place that would never be conducive to routine.

“Your knife sucks,” he tells her, flicking the excess oil off of the blade. He presses the pad of his thumb against the newfound sore spot on his neck and feels the sting of contact with the open wound.

The corners of her lips tilt ruefully in response, and it sends a painful tug through his stomach as he realizes how long it’s been since he’s seen her smile. A _real_ smile, not one that was forced and looked just as much like a cringe of anxiety as it did a sign of happiness. He expects her to leave him to it, to turn and continue with whatever she was working on from their infinite to-do list. But she doesn’t.

“Here,” she says. She closes the few feet between them with only a half second of hesitation, and he can’t help but feel like she’s crossing more than just the physical distance that separates them. She holds out her hand. “Let me help with that.”

It leaves him reeling, and he can only stare at her for a brief moment. Her eyebrows raise and she shakes her hand, an impatient gesture for him to hand the knife over. He surprises even himself when he does.

She takes a seat on the log next to him, then seems to decide that she’s not quite close enough and scoots a few inches closer. She places her fingers lightly beneath his chin and tilts it slightly upwards.

“No sense in adding any more scars than the world already has,” she says dryly, and though her voice is light, he senses a lilt in her tone that sounds almost…sad.

“Have you done this before?” he asks.

“No. But I figured if I have steady enough hands to pull a bullet out of your shoulder, this should be a walk in the park.”

He winces at the reminder, pulling his attention to the stitches that tug painfully beneath his shirt. Thankfully, the encounter with Eligius two days prior hadn’t been deadly, though they’d sure tried like hell to make it so. Clarke’s medical training had taken over quickly, her face pulling into the clinical mask he’d known a long time ago as she and Madi had worked to stitch him up. It was only afterward, when things had quieted and he was very near unconsciousness, that he thought he might have heard a sob and Madi’s voice whispering words of comfort. He was asleep before he could confirm.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she says, as though she’s tracked the direction of his thoughts. Maybe she can still read him as well as he can her. “I don’t know what I would have done if—”

She swallows hard as she stares down at the knife in her hands, fingers wiping away the excess oil with a focus Bellamy knows isn’t necessary.

“I can’t lose you again.” When she meets his eye, her expression is more open than he’s seen from her since they landed, and he thinks for just a moment that maybe the girl he knew is still in there somewhere.

“Look that way,” she says, and the moment is gone as quickly as it appeared.

He does as she says, turning his gaze toward the rest of the empty clearing and tilting his head to allow her access to the length of his neck. It feels strange, he thinks idly, to allow someone to hold a blade to his throat and not feel panic licking at the base of his spine.

_Trust_ , he realizes. He still trusts her. The thought makes him smile.

She works in silence for a moment, her movements becoming more and more sure as she continues. She works at a pace slow enough to be cautious, but quickly enough that the dullness of the blade does not hinder her progress.

She finishes his left side and stands to move to the other end of the log. Her hand trails across the breadth of his shoulders as she does, and he tries to ignore the chills that follow it.

“I’m surprised,” she comments as she begins on his other cheek. “I thought you liked the beard.”

He chuckles softly, trying to limit his movement as she slips the blade once more over his skin.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I guess I just didn’t really care either way anymore.”

She pauses, and from the corner of his eye he can see the odd expression on her face.

“So in the middle of wartime, when everything is going to hell around us, shaving is still a priority. But you spend six years with all the free time in the world for it, and suddenly you don’t care?”

He tries to smile at the joke, but he thinks it comes out as more of a grimace.

“I guess down here it was more of a sense of normalcy,” he explains. “But with you gone—”

He pauses, clears his throat in an attempt to keep his voice steady.

“Without you there, nothing really felt normal.”

He can feel his heart race in his chest as he waits for her reply, waits for her to respond to the words he knows were telling. But she doesn’t. She merely gives a slight nod and continues working.

She finishes in silence, though this one seems much more comfortable than the one they’ve found themselves in recently. Her fingers flit over his skin quickly, the blade becoming a steady rhythm of contact as it glides over his neck and jaw. From time to time, her hands meet either side of his face, turning him this way and that to allow her to reach the area she needs.

Finally, she grabs his pack from the ground and digs a hand in it until she comes up with a scrap of fabric. Clarke kneels in front of him between his knees, taking the rag in her hands. Her touch is feather-light as she gently wipes away the remaining oil from his skin.

“All done.”

She begins to place his supplies back in his pack, folding the rag around the knife and placing it back into the bag, and returns to her perch next to him.

“I don’t blame you, you know,” she says as she places the lid on the tin of the animal fat. “For leaving.”

He feels his breath hitch in his throat. Clarke lightly grips his jaw beneath his fingertips and turns his head, forcing him to meet her eye.

“It had to be done.”

He feels a lump form in the back of his throat and looks away, jaw working as he tries to fight the burning in the backs of his eyes. He shakes his head.

“I’m so sorry, Clarke.”

Her hand finds his in his lap, and he’s surprised at how much smaller they are than he remembered. Her skin is callused, but still soft and smooth and _her_.

 “Look,” she says, her voice soft and raw like she’s trying just as hard to keep it together as he is. “I know things have been… _weird_ with us since you got back. But I hate it.”

He nods. “Me, too.”

“I just,” she stammers. She takes a moment to find her words. “Before everything happened, you and I—we were _something_ to each other. I know I felt it, and I think you did, too.”

His eyes fall shut, and he takes a breath to steel himself against her words. He knows what she means, knows the warmth she’d felt when she’d looked at the man he used to be before everything went to shit. He’d felt it, too.

“But things are different,” she stresses, “and I worry that you think I’m still the girl you left behind six years ago, and I don’t want to disappoint you.” She swallows hard, her grip tightening around his hands like she thinks she can make him understand through her touch. “I’m not that person anymore, Bellamy.”

She lets out a sigh, and he realizes this is the first time she’s let the mask fall since he arrived back on the ground. This girl in front of him is not _his_ Clarke—she’s much stronger, much wiser, though he’d never have thought either were possible. But he sees the girl he used to know in the eyes of this woman, sees her bravery and her compassion.

“No, you’re not,” he agrees. “Neither of us are.”

Clarke nods, her brows furrowing at his assent. Her gaze moves the to the ground beneath them. She looks surprised when he places his knuckle beneath her chin and lifts it to meet his gaze.

“But maybe that’s a good thing,” Bellamy says. “Maybe that just means we get to figure out who we are on the ground all over again. Together.”

Her lashes flutter at his last word, and he knows that like him, she’s taken back to a time when _together_ was all they knew. And he thinks he sees the desire for that again in her eyes; he knows he feels it in his own heart.

“I can’t promise anything,” she tells him.”

“I know.”

“This isn’t the Ark. We could die any time down here, especially now that Eligius has become hostile.”

“I know, Clarke.”

She seems to search his face for something. Whatever it is, she must find it. She leans her head against his shoulder, quiet for a moment.

“Together?” she finally repeats.

“Together,” he confirms, pressing his lips to the top of her hair.

After all, that’s how things should have been all this time, anyway.


End file.
